The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Theater of the Mind

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2018-10-18

Hamza has some friends in the theater business. These friends had an in-house developed Java application to manage seating arrangements, and they had some problems with it. They had lots of problems with it. So Hamza cut them a deal and agreed to take a look.

There were the usual litany of problems: performance was garbage, features bugged out if you didn’t precisely follow a certain path, it crashed all the time, etc. There was also an important missing feature.

19 comments - Last comment @ 03:12

A Load of ProductCodes

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-10-17

“Hey, Kim H, can you sit in on a tech-screen for a new hire?”

The Big Boss had a candidate they wanted hired, but before the hiring could actually happen, a token screening process needed to happen. Kim and a few other staffers were pulled in to screen the candidate, and the screen turned into a Blue Screen, because the candidate crashed hard. Everyone in the room gave them a thumbs down, and passed their report up the chain to the Big Boss.

30 comments - Last comment @ 02:38

My Condition is Complicated

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-10-16

Anneke’s organization is the sort of company where “working” takes precedence over “working well”. Under-staffed, under-budgeted, and under unrealistic deadlines, there simply isn’t any emphasis on code quality. The result is your pretty standard pile of badness: no tests, miles of spaghetti code, fragile features and difficult to modify implementations.

Recently, the powers that be discovered that they could hire half a dozen fresh-out-of-school developers on the cheap, and threw a bunch of fresh-faced kids into that mountain of garbage with no supervision. And that’s how this happened.

14 comments - Last comment @ 2018-10-18

Eine Kleine ProductListItems

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-10-15

Art received a job offer that had some generous terms, and during the interview process, there was an ominous sense that the hiring team was absolutely desperate for someone who had done anything software related.

Upon joining the team, Art found out why. Two years ago, someone had decided they needed to create a web-based storefront, and in a fit of NIH syndrome, it needed to be built from scratch. Unfortunately, they didn't have anyone working at the company with a web development background or even a software development background, so they just threw a book on JavaScript at the network admin and hoped for the best.

12 comments - Last comment @ 2018-10-16

Latin is Making a Comeback?

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2018-10-12

"Well, if I need an email template, lucky me, I now have one handy," writes Paul C.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2018-10-16

Boldly Leaping Over the Span

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-10-11

No one writes HTML anymore. We haven’t for years. These days, your HTML is snippets and components, templates and widgets. Someplace in your application chain, whether server-side or client-side, or even as part of a deployment step, if you’re using a static site generator, some code mashes those templates together and you get some output.

This has some side effects, like div abuse. Each component needs its own container tag, but we often nest components inside each other. Maybe there’s a span in there. If the application is suitably HTML5-y, maybe it’s sections instead.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2018-10-13

Round Two

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-10-10

John works for a manufacturing company which has accrued a large portfolio of C++ code. Developed over the course of decades, by many people, there’s more than a little legacy cruft and coding horrors mixed in. Frustrated with the ongoing maintenance, and in the interests of “modernization”, John was tasked with converting the legacy C++ into C#.

Which meant he had to read through the legacy C++.

16 comments - Last comment @ 2018-10-11

Tern The Bool Around

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-10-09

Some say that the only reason I like ternary code snippets is that it gives me an opportunity to make the title a “tern” pun.

…

21 comments - Last comment @ 2018-10-15

A Floating Date

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2018-10-08

Enterprise integration is its own torturous brand of software development. Imagine all the pain of inheriting someone else's code, but now that code is proprietary, you can't modify it, poorly documented, and exposes an API that might solve somebody's problem, but none of the problems you have, and did I say poorly documented? I meant "the documentation is completely inaccurate and it's possible that this was intentional".

Michael was working on getting SAP integrated to their existing legacy systems. This meant huge piles of bulk data loading, which wasn't so bad- they had a third party module which promised to glue all this stuff together. And in early testing phases, everything went perfectly smooth.

39 comments - Last comment @ 2018-10-17

Let's Hope it's Only a Test

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2018-10-05

"When the notification system about the broken NYC MTA is broken, does that make the MTA meta-broken?" writes T.S.

30 comments - Last comment @ 2018-10-09

Break Out of your Parents

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-10-04

When I first glanced at this submission from Thomas, I almost just scrolled right by. “Oh, it’s just another case where they put the same code in both branches of the conditional,” I said. Then I looked again.

if (obj.success) {
    //#BZ7350
    for (i = 0; i < parent.length; i++) {
        try {
            parent[i]['compositionExportResultMessage'](obj.success, obj.response, 'info');
            break;
        } catch (e) { }
    }
}
else {
    //#BZ7350
    for (i = 0; i < parent.length; i++) {
        try {
            parent[i]['compositionExportResultMessage'](obj.success, obj.response, 'error');
            break;
        } catch (e) { }
    }
}

22 comments - Last comment @ 2018-10-08

Blind Leading the Blind

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-10-03

Corporate Standards. You know, all those rules created over time by bureaucrats who think that they're making things better by mandating consistency. The ones that force you to take time to change an otherwise properly-functioning system to comply with rules that don't really apply in the context of the application, but need to be blindly followed anyway. Here are a couple of good examples.

Kevin L. worked on an application that provides driving directions via device-hosted map application. The device was designed to be bolted to the handlebars of a motorcycle. Based upon your destination and current coordinates, it would display your location and the marked route, noting things like distance to destination, turns, traffic circles and exit ramps. A great deal of effort was put into the visual design, because even though the device *could* provide audio feedback, on a motorcycle, it was impossible to hear.

49 comments - Last comment @ 2018-10-09

An Error on Logging

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-10-02

The beauty of a good logging system is that it allows you to spam logging messages all through your code, but then set the logging level at runtime, so that you have fine grained control over how much logging there is. You can turn the dial from, “things are running smooth in production, so be quiet,” to “WTF THINGS ARE ON FIRE GODS HELP US WHAT IS GOING ON CAN I LAUNCH A DEBUGGER ON THE PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT PLEASE GOD”.

You might write something like this, for example:

30 comments - Last comment @ 2018-10-11

Pointed Array Access

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2018-10-01

I've spent the past week doing a lot of embedded programming, and for me, this has mostly been handling having full-duplex communication between twenty devices on the same serial bus. It also means getting raw bytes and doing the memcpy(&myMessageStructVariable, buffer, sizeof(MessageStruct)). Yes, that's not the best way, and certainly isn't how I'd build it if I didn't have full control over both ends of the network.

Of course, even with that, serial networks can have some noise and errors. That means sometimes I get a packet that isn't the right size, and memcpy will happily read past the end of the buffer, because my const uint8_t * buffer pointer is just a pointer, after all. It's on me to access memory safely. Errors result when I'm incautious.

38 comments - Last comment @ 2018-10-14

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